You might have noticed I like watching conference talks and recommending my favourites, and you might have gotten the wrong idea about my attention span from that :) I actually have a terrible time concentrating on watching a video if that’s all I’m doing, my mind wanders and when I come back to the video I have no idea what’s going on so I have to skip it back to catch what I missed. After that happens a few times in a row I give up and go do something else.

Fortunately, I have a trick to keep myself focused. It’s kind of a ridiculous trick but hey, maybe it’ll work for you. What I do is open up the talk I want to watch in one window, and in another window I open up a silly clicking game like Diggy’s Adventure or Clicker Heroes and play that while I listen to the talk. The reason having those open in separate windows is important is so you can alt-tab to the talk easily if you want to see the current slide.

For me games like those are the digital equivalent of doodling, they give me just enough to do to stay focused but not so much that I get distracted from the talk I’m trying to listen to. They’re also great for convincing myself that I’m really just playing games with a talk on in the background, which makes it not feel like work so I actually do it.

If you want to watch more recorded talks but never seem to get around to it or your mind wanders when you do get around to it, try a really low impact game. It might help and definitely can’t make it worse :)

The big tip for post #8 in the be a better programmer while still having a life series is to become a witch. A Terry Pratchett style witch, to be precise. Terry Pratchett’s witch characters are really great at two things: first sight and second thoughts. To quote him directly:

First Sight and Second Thoughts, that’s what a witch had to rely on: First Sight to see what’s really there, and Second Thoughts to watch the First Thoughts to check that they were thinking right.

Back at my original point, first sight is seeing what’s actually there, not what you wish was there or what you thought was there or what you meant to put there. Does that remind anyone else of debugging?

Fortunately for programmers, we have tools like debuggers and IDEs to help us see what’s actually there. We also have techniques like simply getting up and taking a walk, or explaining our problem to a rubber duck (or maybe another programmer if it’s a really hard problem), or commenting out half of our code and then half of that half and so on until we find the problem line. Let’s just not think about how much programming must have sucked in the days before friendly IDEs that highlight mistakes for you :)

Unrelated image from pexels.com to make this post look nicer in social media shares.

Another part of first sight for programmers is also your attitude. If you don’t want to see the problem, you’re just not going to no matter how observant you are normally. I’m by no means perfect at it myself, but I’m convinced the most useful attitude you can bring to debugging is the simple acceptance that you got at least one thing wrong. The longer you spend insisting that your code should work, the longer it takes to figure out what’s actually wrong with it.

Moving on, second thoughts are thoughts about your thoughts. When you think you know the best way to build something, why do you think that? How do you know you’re right? Is that actually the best way or is it just the first way you thought of? How would you know either way? What constitutes the “best” way to do something? Is “best” the most performant, the easiest to read, the easiest to change, the quickest to write, the easiest to test? If “best” for your project meant quickest to write yesterday, does it still mean that today? How would you know when that changes?

Checking up on yourself like that is really hard to do and that’s why this post is more for me than for you – I’m trying to remind myself to question my assumptions.

One of the traps I fall into most often is looking for an example of what I want to do in our existing code and then assuming the first thing I find is the right way to do it. Shockingly enough, codebases change over time. Just because something worked well when it was written doesn’t mean nobody has thought of a better way since then or that the rest of the app hasn’t changed enough to make the old “right way” completely different from today’s “right way.” Just like you look for a couple of sources that agree with each other when you’re Googling what an error message means, look for a couple of examples in your codebase and if they’re different, check which one is newer.

Getting into the habit of thinking about how you think is not easy (at all!), but it’s useful and, like the other installments of this series, not something that you have to devote all of your free time to. It’s also useful in pretty much every area of your life. When you have any problem to solve, how do you know you’re right about how to solve it? For that matter, how do you know you’re right about what the problem is?

When I’m stressed out, every little thing drives me absolutely crazy. I can end up convinced that what’s bothering me is that this stupid freaking feature won’t work no matter what I do when the real problem is that I’m trying to hit a tight deadline and marketing keeps changing their minds about what’s important and half the QA team is sick so they need extra time to test everything and that means I need to deliver even sooner and everything is terrible!

Okay, so what do you do about that? For starters you really should read that blog post I linked earlier, Amy Hoy goes into a lot of detail about learning to notice yourself thinking. My big tip is just to get into the habit of asking yourself “Why? Why did I decide that? Why is that the best way? Why is that bothering me so much?” Sometimes the answer is going to be stupid simple: I decided to go to cafe at the front of my building for lunch because the weather was hideous and I didn’t want to go outside. Sometimes the answer will lead to more questions, like when you ask yourself “Why did I decide to put that config file in that directory?” In my case the answer was “Because that’s where the other config file lives” which leads to another question: “How do I know both config files should go in the same directory?” From there I learned all sorts of stuff about which files were supposed to go in the original directory and why, and where the other file that was related but not the same type of config ought to live.

This is the kind of thing that takes a lifetime to master, so don’t feel bad if you don’t get it right away. Asking yourself those questions is still worth it even if you only remember to do it sometimes.

Unrelated image from pexels.com to make this post look nicer in social media shares.

No not the architectural style (although I am a fan), I’m talking about taking a break once in a while. I’ve already talked about how churning out work isn’t everything, but it seems like a good time for a reminder. Actually, the ideal time for a reminder would have been last Monday, but I didn’t come up with the idea for this post until last Sunday and it seemed hypocritical to write about how people should take a break by, uh, not taking a break even on Christmas day.

So I hope you did get a break sometime between Christmas and New Year’s Eve and I hope you actually rested instead of pressuring yourself to build a side project or learn something new. If you didn’t get a chance to relax, and not everyone does, I hope you can make some time to relax soon. Not just because working all the time is no way to live, but because rest is necessary if you want to be productive.

At this point I could reel off a list of links justifying the idea that rest is necessary, but that’s really not the point of this post. We all know rest is necessary, we’ve all gone through a crunch at work or poured way too many hours into a college/university/bootcamp project to get it done in time and ended up mentally exhausted and unable to think clearly for days afterward.

The point of this post is to try to convince my readers that it’s okay to take a break. We all know we should, but we put it off and put it off because of the pressure to keep up, to always be coding, to prove that we’re good programmers by grinding ourselves down and sacrificing practically all of our waking hours on the altar of being the best. It’s easy to feel like you’re falling behind, it’s easy to think that everyone else is hacking away every night while you cook dinner and hang out with your friends like a chump, it’s so easy to feel like you’re not doing enough.

Well, programming is all about tradeoffs so let’s talk about tradeoffs. You could spend the vast majority of your non-work waking hours doing more work in the form of personal projects and learning more programming languages, and that would probably make you a better programmer than you would be with less practice. There’s also the fact that practice doesn’t make you better unless it’s the right kind of practice, but let’s ignore that for now. If you generalize a little, I think it is true that more practice is likely to make you a better programmer. But the question is, is it worth it?

Just because you can do something doesn’t mean that it’s worth the trouble or that it’s ever going to be your highest priority. That’s one of many frustrating things about programming that I only learned after I graduated – being able to fix a minor bug doesn’t mean that bug is ever going to be more important to the business than a new feature, so that bug can hang around for years, annoying you every time you see it.

How you spend your free time is a tradeoff like any other in programming – spending that time coding on side projects means you can’t spend it with your friends and family, or going for a walk, or learning how to make pottery or do some basic plumbing or on reading a novel. Of course, if you spend some of your free time learning to dance, that means you can’t spend those hours learning a new technology, so it comes down to what’s worth it to you. And by that I mean what really matters to you personally, not what you think you’re supposed to want, not what your parents want, not what your boss wants, what you want.

And then there’s the available resources part of the tradeoff: you may be able to spend your free time on programming projects at the cost of dumping childcare and the work of maintaining your home and your social life on your (probably female, let’s be honest) partner. That’s a choice you can make, but it’s unlikely to be one you can make and still be a good person.

Is being the best programmer you can possibly be really more important than anything else in your life? If that’s really and truly what you want then go for it with everything you have, but if it’s not, then go after what you really do want and don’t forget that you’re not obligated to want to be the best programmer you can be. Obsession is not required, you’re allowed to be a human being with more than one interest.

Unrelated image from pexels.com to make this post look nicer in social media shares.

You know that feeling when you need to get something done and you just don’t want to? Considering this post was published on a Monday, I bet you do :)

When I don’t feel like doing something, I find it can really help to trick myself. That is, I do a tiny little piece of something that’s related to the thing I need to do but that I can tell myself isn’t the real work. For example, if I’m starting a new feature, I might tell myself I’m not really starting it yet, I’m just poking around in the existing code a little and seeing where I could put it if I actually was starting that feature. Or I might tell myself that I’m not really building that feature, I’m just stubbing out a class and writing a few comments about how I would build if it I were doing that, but I’m totally not, I’m just writing comments, nothing to see here ;)

Minus a certain amount of flailing around trying to figure out the best way to do something, this is basically my process when I’m building stuff:

Don’t do the thing, just poke around in the code a little.
Don’t do the thing, just make notes about what you find.
Don’t do the thing, just write down ways you could do the thing if you were going to (but you’re not).
Don’t do the thing, just stub out a class (if needed) where you would do the thing.
Don’t do the thing, just write some comments where you would do the thing.
Don’t do the thing, just stub out a method.
Don’t do the thing, just pseudocode one method.
Don’t do the thing, just fill in one method.
Don’t do the thing, just write down one thing you’ll need to test.
Don’t do the thing, just pseudocode one test.
Don’t do the thing, just fill in one test.

Honestly, that’s the core of software development. Software design and architecture are certainly important too, but I’m convinced the single most important part of actually building stuff is breaking down problems into manageable little pieces. If we had to think about the entire application all the time, we’d all end up under our desks weeping quietly. Only the ability to ignore the big picture for a while and focus on one tiny piece allows us to actually get anything done.

Of course just because “break the problem down into tiny pieces” sounds simple doesn’t mean it’s easy. It’s really common to get side-tracked trying to figure out how something unrelated works (I have the worst time leaving stuff alone even it’s probably not relevant to what I’m currently doing), or to spend far too much time trying to figure out what the best way to do something is (that one’s so common we have a word for it), and sometimes you just don’t know where to start or the problem has so many moving parts that you feel overwhelmed and quietly freak out a little.

On the upside, learning to break problems into manageable pieces gets easier with practice. For me it’s mostly a matter of reminding myself that I’ve done this plenty of times before and I’ll solve this problem too.

If you’re having trouble getting started, see if you can trick yourself into doing something. Remember you don’t have to solve the whole problem at once, you can start with a tiny piece of it.

I realized the other day my blog is just over a year old. My very first post was a Play framework tip that took two whole sentences to explain. Since then I’ve published 71 more posts, go me! Turns out one or two posts a week over a year really adds up.

What I’ve learned from my year of blogging is that building a habit is way more important to blogging regularly than motivation is. Some weeks I really do not want to write a post, but I do it anyway because breaking the habit bugs me more than sucking it up and writing the damned post :) Seriously, if I waited until inspiration struck to write a post there would be less than a dozen of them on this blog.

Not that you shouldn’t take advantage of motivation when you have it! The big thing that helped me finally start this blog after ages of thinking I should really start blogging was starting a new job and learning all sorts of cool stuff I wanted to a) share, and b) make sure I didn’t forget. Writing things down helps me remember them, and even if I forget stuff I’ve blogged about, I know where to look for it.

Another thing I’ve learned is that explaining something is a great way to learn it. I hope my series of posts about SOLID design principles were useful to other people, but I probably learned more writing them than any of my readers did. You may think you understand something after you’ve read a few posts about it, but there’s nothing like trying to write your own explanation of it to show you where the gaps are in your understanding.

Over the last year my most popular post was Showing up is my secret superpower. It’s really cool that people liked something I wrote enough to share it. Sometimes stuff you throw out there because you don’t know what to write about really clicks with people.

A little while ago I posted a productivity tip and immediately started worrying that I sounded like one of those awful productivity gurus who preach maximum productivity all day every day what do you mean leisure has value?

I want to be very clear here: my worth as a human being is not measured by how much stuff I get done and neither is yours. My sole interest in productivity is breaking the shame spiral.

The shame spiral I’m talking about is the horrible feedback loop where you procrastinate, feel ashamed of not getting enough done, procrastinate more because you associate the work with shame, feeling more ashamed because you’re still not getting anything done and on and on. I don’t want you to be the perfect [insert work here]-producing machine, I want you to be happy and to feel good about what you’ve done at the end of the day. In fact, I actively want you to not be a perfect work-producing machine because that’s no way to live. If you don’t enjoy your life and have time for friends and family (chosen or assigned) and hobbies it doesn’t matter how much you get done.

You will never ever hear productivity tips from me about shit like how much work you can get done if you start waking up at 5 am or how you should listen to professional development audiobooks on your commute. You are allowed to listen to music and relax on your way to work. You do not have to cram something useful into every minute of every day.

A question I hardly ever see anyone ask in articles or blog posts about productivity is why you want to be more productive. Everyone just assumes that getting more done must automatically be a good thing. Getting stuff done is a great feeling if it’s something important to you and you’re not pushing yourself into burnout, but you know what else is great? Downtime. Playing a boardgame with your friends or trying out a new restaurant or going for a walk or reading a novel.

Personally, I do feel unfulfilled if I do nothing but play computer games when I come home from work for too many days in a row. I like the sense of accomplishment that comes from making progress on personal projects. But just like computer games can’t be my whole life, neither can work. That’s just not healthy and that lack of perspective leads to shitty work anyway.

Before you look at a productivity tip, ask yourself why you want to get more done. If you have a project that you want to finish, great! But if you feel guilty if you’re not doing something useful every minute of every day or you don’t want your parents to be disappointed in you or you feel like you’ll be left behind if you don’t spend every minute working, you officially have my permission to say “Fuck it, I’m going to go play videogames.” Don’t be productive for the sake of being productive, do stuff that’s either personally meaningful to you or fun.

I’ve been working through the Learning How to Learn course on Coursera, and one of the things the teachers recommend is using the Pomodoro Technique. When I first heard about it it sounded too simple to work, but you know, it’s actually really helpful. I personally have trouble getting started on tasks in part because I feel like it’s going to take all day to get it done and I just don’t wanna :) The Pomodoro Technique helps me because there’s a built-in stop time – when 25 minutes are up, it’s time for a break.

The Pomodoro timer I use is tomato-timer.com. I can’t say I really need another tab open all the time (if I counted correctly I have 42 tabs open right now), but it’s super easy to use and I like not having to install anything. If you have trouble getting started or staying focused, give it a shot. It can’t work any worse than what you’re already doing :)